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Founder Mode

paulgraham.com

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Re: Founder Mode

#111

Post by atulatul »

lwansbrough wrote: post #106
amadeuspagel wrote: post #79

"We hired truly great people and gave them the room to do great work. A lot of companies [...] hire people to tell them what to do. We hire people to tell us what to do. We figure we're paying them all this money; their job is to figure out what to do and tell us." -- Steve Jobs

But then you hear about stories of employees coming to Steve’s office to give a presentation about how such and such technology isn’t possible, then Steve says yes it is figure it out, and they do.

"Rectangles with rounded corners are everywhere!"

https://www.folklore.org/Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.html

Re: Founder Mode

#112

Post by maccard »

ackbar03 wrote: post #93
amadeuspagel wrote: post #79

"We hired truly great people and gave them the room to do great work. A lot of companies [...] hire people to tell them what to do. We hire people to tell us what to do. We figure we're paying them all this money; their job is to figure out what to do and tell us." -- Steve Jobs

How do you guys actually hire the superstars to join your startup as the early employees/partners? And not just the typical friend you know who's "a pretty smart guy" and his friend and so on

Instead of thinking of them as some superstar, think of it like hiring an IC - you want someone who can, and will ship, especially in the face of ambiguity. If you hire a mega talented engineer who specialises in designing fault tolerant distributed systems, you’re going to build a fault tolerant distributed system. If you hire someone who ships scrappy features and doesn’t leave a giant mess behind you, you have a much better chance of success. Finding those people is the same as finding any other developer.

Re: Founder Mode

#113

Post by meiraleal »

ackbar03 wrote: post #93
amadeuspagel wrote: post #79

"We hired truly great people and gave them the room to do great work. A lot of companies [...] hire people to tell them what to do. We hire people to tell us what to do. We figure we're paying them all this money; their job is to figure out what to do and tell us." -- Steve Jobs

How do you guys actually hire the superstars to join your startup as the early employees/partners? And not just the typical friend you know who's "a pretty smart guy" and his friend and so on

You become friends with pretty smart guys that have the potential to become superstars. Which superstar will join a wannabe startup?

Re: Founder Mode

#114

Post by JonChesterfield »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #13
jerrygoyal wrote: post #6

> Whatever founder mode consists of, it's pretty clear that it's going to break the principle that the CEO should engage with the company only via his or her direct reports. Jensen Huang (Nvidia) engages with only direct reports.

In 2010, my wife was interviewing CEOs as part of a school project. She emailed Jensen Huang out of the blue, to his email address @nvidia, and got a response and a live interview. There were a few others who were almost as accommodating, but, looking back on it from time to time, I'm still surprised by Jensen's openness and accessibility. So I'm thinking that although he might engage only with direct reports, he's a…

I'm pretty sure the CEO of a tech company would be responsive to emails from individual contributors. At least below some frequency.

I'm completely sure that writing said email would deeply upset the reporting chain thus bypassed, plausibly in fired on the spot for unrelated reasons when they noticed.

Re: Founder Mode

#115

Post by mdorazio »

mihaic wrote: post #75

After two unsuccessful but still alive start-ups, I've come to very similar conclusions. Absolutely every single time I've tried to say to it anyone other than a founder I was met with disbelief that eventually turned into accusations of not knowing how to be a leader. While I do admit that I didn't fire people as quickly as I should have, most of our structural problems came from employees simply doing what was best…

How did you incentivize people to do what was best for the company rather than only for themselves? What percentage of it did they own? Why should they ignore their own self-interest in favor of your company's long-term success?

There's a weird cognitive dissonance I've run into where career advice from most people on HN boils down to "Companies don't care about you. Optimize your own total comp. Jump ship when opportunities come up. Don't bother with loyalty." And then on the flip side you have founders who expect employees to act like the company is their family, but with zero reason to do so.

I think there must be a better way to get employees, and especially executives, to care about a company's long-term success rather than about quarterly goals and near-term comp. I'm not sure what that is, but I think it might need to be related to shares in a profit-sharing plan rather than traditional equity shares.

Re: Founder Mode

#116

Post by breck »

ackbar03 wrote: post #93
amadeuspagel wrote: post #79

"We hired truly great people and gave them the room to do great work. A lot of companies [...] hire people to tell them what to do. We hire people to tell us what to do. We figure we're paying them all this money; their job is to figure out what to do and tell us." -- Steve Jobs

How do you guys actually hire the superstars to join your startup as the early employees/partners? And not just the typical friend you know who's "a pretty smart guy" and his friend and so on

> actually hire the superstars to join your startup as the early employees/partners?

You have to become a superstar first.

I had the good luck of living down the street from the AirBedAndBreakfast founders in San Francisco in 2008 and we'd commute together to our Tuesday night YC dinners in Mountainview.

I picked up early that Nate was already a superstar coder, Joe was a superstar designer, and Brian was a superstar designer and salesman.

I knew I was not, and had to double down and practice, practice, practice.

Craftsmanship comes first. It took those guys decades of practice at their crafts before they founded AirBedAndBreakfast.

Think of Paul Graham. Before he created HackerNews and YC, he had already written and published a book on Lisp! A master craftsman.

Craftsmanship comes first.

If you are not a master at your craft, don't even waste your time trying to recruit superstars. Instead, spend your time on practice.

Re: Founder Mode

#117

Post by sneak »

> For example, Steve Jobs used to run an annual retreat for what he considered the 100 most important people at Apple, and these were not the 100 people highest on the org chart. Can you imagine the force of will it would take to do this at the average company? And yet imagine how useful such a thing could be. It could make a big company feel like a startup.

Can you imagine being the 101st to 110th most important and not getting an invite, while people with lower rank do?

I suspect the value of such a tradition is only able to be captured in very large organizations, otherwise it’s just a morale-destroying exercise for 80%.

Re: Founder Mode

#118

Post by DannyBee »

_9hey wrote: post #89

When I first joined the corporate world, I finished some tasks for my team and immediately went to other teams to ask if they needed help with anything. Astonishingly, this was met with backlash. This was at a heavily culture driven company with a core value of "self employed mentality" and "breaking down silos". I don't blame my manager, it probably made him look bad in that environment. The corporate world has done…

The larger the company the more inconsistent the experience is because nobody is really truly held accountable to culture when they can (pretend) to produce business results. Even places that theoretically want to care usually just put it lower on the priority list and end up not caring by default.

I was promoted 7 times at Google to VP for basically doing what you write in the first sentence (at scale). Then I meet people who were laid off and felt they operated the same way.

The main difference seems to be I worked in areas that literally couldn’t afford to have the kind of managers and leaders that would ding people (vs support people) for doing this, so they didn’t. The other folks worked in areas that made enough money that the culture could afford to be shitty, and it would take a long time to matter. So it was.

my experience is that eventually the company circumstances change which requires different cultures to operate differently to still be successful. Either they do or the company dies.

PG mostly seems to be suggesting that we should try hard to avoid the shitty cultures in the first place rather than accept it as an artifact of scale. I’m not sure I believe that’s possible past a certain size but I do think it’s interesting to try. But for now, I mostly come down on the side of build smaller companies that are worth more.

Re: Founder Mode

#119

Post by detourdog »

breck wrote: post #116
ackbar03 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you guys actually hire the superstars to join your startup as the early employees/partners? And not just the typical friend you know who's "a pretty smart guy" and his friend and so on

> actually hire the superstars to join your startup as the early employees/partners? You have to become a superstar first. I had the good luck of living down the street from the AirBedAndBreakfast founders in San Francisco in 2008 and we'd commute together to our Tuesday night YC dinners in Mountainview. I picked up early that Nate was already a superstar coder, Joe was a superstar designer, and Brian was a superstar…

Don’t think of people as superstars. Think of them as individuals that are able to pay attention and consistently meet expectations.

I’m starting to think paying attention to what is happening is undervalued.

Re: Founder Mode

#120

Post by RandomLensman »

Chance-Device wrote: post #88

When a company is successful, by which I mean it turns a healthy profit and eventually even enough to go public, it ends up sustaining a lot more employees doing a lot less than a smaller, leaner company that can’t afford inefficiency. That doesn’t matter much to the successful company, it makes more than enough money to cover the inefficiency, and the inefficiency isn’t causing any real trouble - it just means that…

Conversly, I have seen a fair number of start-ups creating very inefficient setups and processes - having some knowledge on how to do things effectively and efficiently is something that needs to be acquired.
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